Piketty Quotes & Sayings

Although data on this are sparse, it also seems that US politicians of both parties are much wealthier than their European counterparts and in a totally different category from the average American, which might explain why they tend to confuse their own private interest with the general interest. — Thomas Piketty

There is a fundamentalist belief by capitalists that capital will save the world, and it just isn't so. — Thomas Piketty

Inequality is not necessarily bad in itself: the key question is to decide whether it is justified, whether there are reasons for it. — Thomas Piketty

Economists have put themselves in a position where what they are doing is supposed to be impossible to understand for outsiders, so they don't even talk - sometimes not even with their girlfriend or boyfriend or friends - about what they are doing. — Thomas Piketty

The concrete, physical reality of inequality is visible to the naked eye and naturally inspires sharp but contradictory political judgments. Peasant and noble, worker and factory owner, waiter and banker: each has his or her own unique vantage point and sees important aspects of how other people live and what relations of power and domination exist between social groups, and these observations shape each person's judgment of what is and is not just. Hence there will always be a fundamentally subjective and psychological dimension to inequality, which inevitably gives rise to political conflict that no purportedly scientific analysis can alleviate. — Thomas Piketty

What is most frightening about Vautrin's lecture is that his brisk portrait of Restoration society contains such precise figures. As I will soon show, the structure of the income and wealth hierarchies in nineteenth-century France was such that the standard of living the wealthiest French people could attain greatly exceeded that to which one could aspire on the basis of income from labor alone. Under such conditions, why work? And why behave morally at all? Since social inequality was in itself immoral and unjustified, why not be thoroughly immoral and appropriate capital by whatever means are available? The — Thomas Piketty

We know too little about global wealth dynamics, so we need international transmission of bank information. — Thomas Piketty

no mathematical formula or econometric estimate can tell us exactly what tax rate ought to be applied to what level of income. Only collective deliberation and democratic experimentation can do that. — Thomas Piketty

One way to have broader access to wealth is to reduce the tax on the large group and increase the tax on the very top so concentration of wealth doesn't get to extreme levels. — Thomas Piketty

There is no escaping the fact, however, that social science research on the distribution of wealth was for a long time based on a relatively limited set of firmly established facts together with a wide variety of purely theoretical speculations. — Thomas Piketty

When you are an entrepreneur, you have founded your own firm, it is so easy to find that you exist - you are the main shareholder of your company; it is very easy to look at the stock market position of your company to know how rich you are. — Thomas Piketty

The Marikana tragedy calls to mind earlier instances of violence. At Haymarket Square in Chicago on May 1, 1886, and then at Fourmies, in northern France, on May 1, 1891, police fired on workers striking for higher wages. Does this kind of violent clash between labor and capital belong to the past, or will it be an integral part of twenty-first-century history? — Thomas Piketty

monopsony" rather than monopoly), in which case the owner of capital can impose a rate of return greater than the marginal productivity of his capital. — Thomas Piketty

I don't think there is any serious evidence that we need to be paying people more than 100 times the average wage in order to get high-performing managers. — Thomas Piketty

Economic growth is quite simply incapable of satisfying this democratic and meritocratic hope, which must create specific institutions for the purpose and not rely solely on market forces or technological progress. — Thomas Piketty

Capital is never quiet: it is always risk-oriented and entrepreneurial, at least at its inception, yet it always tends to transform itself into rents as it accumulates in large enough amounts - that is its vocation, its logical destination. What, then, gives us the vague sense that social inequality today is very different from social inequality in the age of Balzac and Austen? Is this just empty talk with no purchase on reality, or can we identify objective factors to explain why some people think that modern capital has become more "dynamic" and less "rent-seeking? — Thomas Piketty

I don't pretend that I can predict the future value of the growth rate or rate of return. — Thomas Piketty

Conversely, younger people, in particular those born in the 1970s and 1980s, have already experienced (to a certain extent) the important role that inheritance will once again play in their lives and the lives of their relatives and friends. For this group, for example, whether or not a child receives gifts from parents can have a major impact in deciding who will own property and who will not, at what age, and how extensive that property will be - in any case, to a much greater extent than in the previous generation. Inheritance is playing a larger part in their lives, careers, and individual and family choices than it did with the baby boomers. — Thomas Piketty

I was born too late to have any temptation with communism, or at least Soviet-type communism. Travelling in Eastern Europe and the ex-Soviet Union, you clearly don't want to defend a system that would have empty shops and a totalitarian regime and internal passports. — Thomas Piketty

a very substantial and growing inequality of capital income since 1980 accounts for about one-third of the increase in income inequality in the United States - a far from negligible amount. — Thomas Piketty

Progress in medicine together with improved living conditions has therefore, it is argued, totally transformed the very essence of capital. — Thomas Piketty

Economists should be modest and be aware that they are part of the broader social science community. We need to be pragmatic about the methods we use. When we need to do history, we should do history. When we need to study political science, we should study political science. — Thomas Piketty

(which did not exist before the creation of the income tax in 1913) — Thomas Piketty

Taxation is neither good nor bad in itself. Everything depends on how taxes are collected and what they are used for. — Thomas Piketty

Yeah, I am in favor of migration. But I am also in favor of education. But at the same time, I am in favor of progressive taxation. I think we need all of this. I think we don't have to choose one. — Thomas Piketty

It's important to realize that innovation and growth in itself are not sufficient to moderate inequality of wealth. — Thomas Piketty

As long as the incomes of the various classes of contemporary society remain beyond the reach of scientific inquiry, there can be no hope of producing a useful economic and social history. — Thomas Piketty

The democratic ideal has always been related to a moderate level of inequality. I think one big reason why electoral democracy flourished in 19th century America better than 19th century Europe is because you had more equal distribution of wealth in America. — Thomas Piketty

I'm not as pessimistic as what a number of people seem to believe. — Thomas Piketty

(autarky does not encourage technological transfer). — Thomas Piketty

The only continent not in equilibrium is Africa, where a substantial share of capital is owned by foreigners. — Thomas Piketty

It is not out of the question that the two forces of divergence will ultimately come together in the twenty-first century. This has already happened to some extent and may yet become a global phenomenon, which could lead to levels of inequality never before seen, as well as to a radically new structure of inequality. Thus far, however, these striking patterns reflect two distinct underlying phenomena. — Thomas Piketty

Once constituted, capital reproduces itself faster than output increases. The past devours the future. — Thomas Piketty

We know something about billionaire consumption, but it is hard to measure some of it. Some billionaires are consuming politicians, others consume reporters, and some consume academics... — Thomas Piketty

I am not political. It is not my job. But I would be happy if politicians could read my work and draw some conclusions from it. — Thomas Piketty

To be sure, the cost of managing capital and of "formal" financial intermediation (that is, the investment advice and portfolio management services provided by a bank or official financial institution or real estate agency or managing partner) is obviously taken into account and deducted from the income on capital in calculating the average rate of return (as presented here). But this is not the case with "informal" financial intermediation: every investor spends time - in some cases a lot of time - managing his own portfolio and affairs and determining which investments are likely to be the most profitable. This effort can in certain cases be compared to genuine entrepreneurial labor or to a form of business activity. — Thomas Piketty

The sharp reduction in income inequality that we observe in almost all the rich countries between 1914 and 1945 was due above all to the world wars and the violent economic and political shocks they entailed (especially for people with large fortunes). It had little to do with the tranquil process of intersectoral mobility described by Kuznets. — Thomas Piketty

By comparing various sources of data, moreover, it is possible to estimate that the average income of the parents of Harvard students is currently about $450,000, which corresponds to the average income of the top 2 percent of the US income hierarchy.32 Such a finding does not seem entirely compatible with the idea of selection based solely on merit. The contrast between the official meritocratic discourse and the reality seems particularly extreme in this case. The total absence of transparency regarding selection procedures should also be noted.33 — Thomas Piketty

The bad news (or good news, depending on your point of view) is that things have always been like this. — Thomas Piketty

Inequalities at the bottom of the US wage distribution have closely followed the evolution of thee minimum wage: the gap between the bottom 10 percent of the wage distribution and the overall average wage widened significantly in the 1980s, then narrowed in the 1990s, and finally increased again in the 2000s. Nevertheless, inequalities at the top of the distribution - for example, the share of total wages going to the top 10 percent -- increased steadily throughout this period. Clearly, the minimum wage has an impact at the bottom of the distribution but much less influence at the top, where other forces are at work. — Thomas Piketty

Autarky has never promoted prosperity. — Thomas Piketty

It's not Utopian to believe that we can create a global registry of financial assets so we know who owns what in different countries. — Thomas Piketty

In all human societies, health and education have an intrinsic value: the ability to enjoy years of good health, like the ability to acquire knowledge and culture, is one of the fundamental purposes of civilization. — Thomas Piketty

Democracy will never be supplanted by a republic of experts - and that is a very good thing. — Thomas Piketty

The dynamics of the global distribution of capital are at once economic, political, and military. This was already the case in the colonial era, when the great powers of the day, Britain and France foremost among them, were quick to roll out the cannon to protect their investments. Clearly, the same will be true in the twenty-first century, in a tense new global political configuration whose contours are difficult to predict in advance. — Thomas Piketty

wealth in the rich countries is currently divided into two approximately equal (or comparable) parts: real estate and financial assets. — Thomas Piketty

Contrary to Piketty's rentier hypothesis, I don't see anyone on the [Forbes 400 list of the wealthiest Americans] whose ancestors bought a great parcel of land in 1780 and have been accumulating family wealth by collecting rents ever since. In America, that old money is long gone - through instability, inflation, taxes, philanthropy, and spending. — Bill Gates

I loved American universities. In many ways, they are better organized - certainly than French universities. — Thomas Piketty

My premise is not to tax to destroy the wealth of the wealthy; it's to increase the wealth of the bottom and the middle class. — Thomas Piketty

When the rate of return on capital significantly exceeds the growth rate of the economy (as it did through much of history until the nineteenth century and as is likely to be the case again in the twenty-first century), then it logically follows that inherited wealth grows faster than output and income. People — Thomas Piketty

Protectionism does not produce wealth, and free trade and economic openness are ultimately in everyone's interest — Thomas Piketty

What was the good of industrial development, what was the good of all the technological innovations, toil, and population movements if, after half a century of industrial growth, the condition of the masses was still just as miserable as before, and all lawmakers could do was prohibit factory labor by children under the age of eight? — Thomas Piketty

For far too long economists have sought to define themselves in terms of their supposedly scientific methods. In fact, those methods rely on an immoderate use of mathematical models, which are frequently no more than an excuse for occupying the terrain and masking the vacuity of the content. — Thomas Piketty

In 1860, the average price of a male slave of prime working age was roughly $2,000, whereas the average wage of a free farm laborer was on the order of $200. — Thomas Piketty

the baby boom cohorts had to make it on their own, almost as much as the interwar and turn-of-the-century cohorts, who were devastated by war. By contrast, the cohorts born in the last third of the century experienced the powerful influence of inherited wealth to almost the same degree as the cohorts of the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries. — Thomas Piketty

Wealth is so concentrated that a large segment of society is virtually unaware of its existence. — Thomas Piketty

statistical indices such as the Gini coefficient give an abstract and sterile view of inequality, which makes it difficult for people to grasp their position in the contemporary hierarchy (always a useful exercise, particularly when one belongs to the upper centiles of the distribution and tends to forget it, as is often the case with economists). — Thomas Piketty

tax is always more than just a tax: it is also a way of defining norms and categories and imposing a legal framework on economic activity. — Thomas Piketty

can we imagine political institutions that might regulate today's global patrimonial capitalism justly as well as efficiently? — Thomas Piketty

Goldin and Katz have no doubt that increased wage inequality in the United States is due to a failure to invest sufficiently in higher education. More precisely, too many people failed to receive the necessary training, in part because families could not afford the high cost of tuition. In order to reverse this trend, they conclude, the United States should invest heavily in education so that as many people as possible can attend college. — Thomas Piketty

political democracies that do not democratize their economic systems are inherently unstable. — Thomas Piketty

One should be wary, however, of the conventional wisdom that modern economic growth is a marvelous instrument for revealing individual talents and aptitudes. There is some truth in this view, but since the early nineteenth century it has all too often been used to justify inequalities of all sorts, no matter how great their magnitude and no matter what their real causes may be, while at the same time gracing the winners in the new industrial economy with every imaginable virtue. — Thomas Piketty

The reality was so striking that it even found expression in an animated cartoon, The Aristocats, set in Paris in 1910. The size of the old lady's fortune is not mentioned, but to judge by the splendor of her residence and by the zeal of her butler Edgar to get rid of Duchesse and her three kittens, it must have been considerable. — Thomas Piketty

Income from labor [in the United States] is about as unequally distributed as has ever been observed anywhere. — Thomas Piketty

For individuals whose only capital is a small balance in a checking account, the return is negative, because such balances yield no interest and are eaten away by inflation. Savings accounts often yield little more than the inflation rate. — Thomas Piketty

The U.S. is the country that invented progressive taxation of income and of inherited wealth in the 1910s and '20s. — Thomas Piketty

one would expect to see a flow of investments in Africa from other countries, especially China and other Asian nations. — Thomas Piketty

the decrease in the top marginal income tax rate led to an explosion of very high incomes, which then increased the political influence of the beneficiaries of the change in the tax laws, who had an interest in keeping top tax rates low or even decreasing them further and who could use their windfall to finance political parties, pressure groups, and think tanks. — Thomas Piketty

I want to be clear that at this stage I am not making a judgment about whether a society of this kind really deserves to be characterized as "hypermeritocratic." It is hardly surprising that the winners in such a society would wish to describe the social hierarchy in this way, and sometimes they succeed in convincing some of the losers. — Thomas Piketty

Social scientific research is and always will be tentative and imperfect. It does not claim to transform economics, sociology, and history into exact sciences. But by patiently searching for facts and patterns and calmly analyzing the economic, social, and political mechanisms that might explain them, it can inform democratic debate and focus attention on the right questions. It can help to redefine the terms of debate, unmask certain preconceived or fraudulent notions, and subject all positions to constant critical scrutiny. In my view, this is the role that intellectuals, including social scientists, should play, as citizens like any other but with the good fortune to have more time than others to devote themselves to study (and even to be paid for it - a signal privilege). — Thomas Piketty

And in the most inegalitarian countries, such as the United States in the early 2010s (where, as will emerge later, income from labor is about as unequally distributed as has ever been observed anywhere), the top decile gets 35 percent of the total, whereas the bottom half gets only 25 percent. — Thomas Piketty

taxes consumed less than 10 percent of national income in all four countries during the nineteenth century and up to World War I. This reflects the fact that the state at that time had very little involvement in economic and social life. — Thomas Piketty

'Das Kapital,' I think, is very difficult to read, and for me, it was not very influential. — Thomas Piketty

the future could hold in store a new world of inequality more extreme than any that preceded it. — Thomas Piketty

The most striking fact is no doubt that in all these societies, half of the population own virtually nothing: the poorest 50 percent invariably own less than 10 percent of national wealth, and generally less than 5 percent. — Thomas Piketty

In the first place, just as income tax returns allow us to study changes in income inequality, estate tax returns enable us to study changes in the inequality of wealth. — Thomas Piketty

In contrast to what many people in Britain and the United States believe, the true figures on growth (as best one can judge from official national accounts data) show that Britain and the United States have not grown any more rapidly since 1980 than Germany, France, Japan, Denmark, or Sweden. In other words, the reduction of top marginal income tax rates and the rise of top incomes do not seem to have stimulated productivity (contrary to the predictions of supply-side theory) or at any rate did not stimulate productivity enough to be statistically detectable at the macro level. — Thomas Piketty

What I argue for is a progressive tax, a global tax, based on the taxation of private property. — Thomas Piketty

I think if you look back through time, the history of income, wealth and taxation is full of surprise. So I am not terribly impressed by those who know in advance what will or will not happen. — Thomas Piketty

This leads to the idea of a race between education and technology: if the supply of skills does not increase at the same pace as the needs of technology, then groups whose training is not sufficiently advanced will earn less and be relegated to devalued lines of work, and inequality with respect to labor will increase. In order to avoid this, the educational system must increase its supply of new types of training and its output of new skills at a sufficiently rapid pace. If equality is to decrease, moreover, the supply of new skills must increase even more rapidly, especially for the least well educated. — Thomas Piketty

For millions of people, "wealth" amounts to little more than a few weeks' wages in a checking account or low-interest savings account, a car, and a few pieces of furniture. The inescapable reality is this: wealth is so concentrated that a large segment of society is virtually unaware of its existence, so that some people imagine that it belongs to surreal or mysterious entities. That is why it is so essential to study capital and its distribution in a methodical, systematic way. — Thomas Piketty

the function of the system of financial intermediation (banks and financial markets): to find the best possible uses for capital, such that each available unit of capital is invested where it is most productive (at the opposite ends of the earth, if need be) and pays the highest possible return to the investor. — Thomas Piketty

The main force pushing toward reduction in inequality has always been the diffusion of knowledge and the diffusion of education. — Thomas Piketty

Taxation is not a technical matter. It is preeminently a political and philosophical issue, perhaps the most important of all political issues. — Thomas Piketty

When the rate of return on capital exceeds the rate of growth of output and income, as it did in the nineteenth century and seems quite likely to do again in the twenty-first, capitalism automatically generates arbitrary and unsustainable inequalities that radically undermine the meritocratic values on which democratic societies are based. — Thomas Piketty

showed that even with the considerable increase in the average level of education over the course of the twentieth century, earned income inequality did not decrease. Qualification levels shifted upward: a high school diploma now represents what a grade school certificate used to mean, a college degree what a high school diploma used to stand for, and so on. — Thomas Piketty

According to Piketty, if r remains at its historical rate of about 5 percent, then all the negative developments related to the inequality from the 19th century will be repeated. These will include disrespect for working people; worshiping of people who do not work and enjoy leisurely life by living at the expense of other people's labor; political acts that disdain equal opportunity and deny democracy; and opportunities for the rich to buy politicians. What logical conclusion can be made from Piketty's research? If this development continues, then by the end of the 21st century, the world's wealth may become the property of a few enormously rich individuals and institutions. Then, 99.9 percent of humans will end up working for a small number of oligarchs, who will accumulate their wealth by virtue of heredity instead of earning it based on merit. — I.K. Mullins

None of the Asian countries that have moved closer to the developed countries of the West in recent years has benefited from large foreign investments, whether it be Japan, South Korea, or Taiwan and more recently China. In essence, all of these countries themselves financed the necessary investments in physical capital and, even more, in human capital, which the latest research holds to be the key to long-term growth.35 Conversely, countries owned by other countries, whether in the colonial period or in Africa today, have been less successful, most notably because they have tended to specialize in areas without much prospect of future development and because they have been subject to chronic political instability. — Thomas Piketty

Everyone is political in his or her own way. — Thomas Piketty

When inequality gets to an extreme, it is completely useless for growth. — Thomas Piketty

We want capitalism and market forces to be the slave of democracy rather than the opposite. — Thomas Piketty

I don't live in the Cold War. Some people maybe still live in the Cold War, but this is their problem, not mine. — Thomas Piketty

Our democratic societies rest on a meritocratic worldview, or at any rate a meritocratic hope, by which I mean a belief in a society in which inequality is based more on merit and effort than on kinship and rents. This belief and this hope play a very crucial role in modern society, for a simple reason: in a democracy, the professed equality of rights of all citizens contrasts sharply with the very real inequality of living conditions, and in order to overcome this contradiction it is vital to make sure that social inequalities derive from rational and universal principles rather than arbitrary contingencies. Inequalities must therefore be just and useful to all, at least in the realm of discourse and as far as possible in reality as well. — Thomas Piketty

I certainly agree that capital is not a one-dimensional object, and that the return on capital takes very different forms for different assets or different people. — Thomas Piketty

Market forces and capitalism by themselves aren't sufficient to ensure the common good and to limit the concentration of wealth at levels that are compatible with democratic ideals. — Thomas Piketty

A tax on capital would promote the general interest over private interests while preserving economic openness and the forces of competition. — Thomas Piketty

When it comes to decreasing inequalities of wealth for good or reducing unusually high levels of public debt, a progressive tax on capital is generally a better tool than inflation. — Thomas Piketty

One can even imagine that inflation tends to improve the relative position of the wealthiest individuals compared to the least wealthy, in that it enhances the importance of financial managers and intermediaries. A person with 10 or 50 million euros cannot afford the money managers that Harvard has but can nevertheless pay financial advisors and stockbrokers to mitigate the effects of inflation. By contrast, a person with only 10 or 50 thousand euros to invest will not be offered the same choices by her broker (if she has one): contacts with financial advisors are briefer, and many people in this category keep most of their savings in checking accounts that pay little or nothing and/or savings accounts that pay little more than the rate of inflation. — Thomas Piketty

For industrial goods, productivity growth has been more rapid than for the economy as a whole, so that prices in this sector have fallen relative to the average of all prices. Foodstuffs is a sector in which productivity has increased continuously and crucially over the very long run (thereby allowing a greatly increased population to be fed by ever fewer hands, liberating a growing portion of the workforce for other tasks), even though the increase in productivity has been less rapid in the agricultural sector than in the industrial sector, so that food prices have evolved at roughly the same rate as the average of all prices. Finally, productivity growth in the service sector has generally been low (or even zero in some cases, which explains why this sector has tended to employ a steadily increasing share of the workforce), so that the price of services has increased more rapidly than the average of all prices. — Thomas Piketty

I am afraid that if you don't find peaceful domestic solutions to our inequality and social problems, then it's always tempting to find other people responsible for our problems. — Thomas Piketty